Tuesday, March 29, 2005

'A bit more ear please!': Headscarves in France

But the image that one was left with was of the hapless headteacher stopping the Muslims one by one at the school gate, singling them out, insisting on minor adjustments to their dress (“A bit more ear please!”). Utterly, utterly humiliating for all concerned. And the women themselves, now convinced that they would never be accepted in France. One had ambitions to be a nurse, but the government has now extended the law to medical service. Petty inspection, endless argument about the tiniest details of the garb worn by “those people”: humiliating and counterproductive.

I have a hard time understanding why the French aren't getting it about this law. I'm half-tempted to go to Paris this summer and do my own inspections -- situationist parodies of the routine described above on the Paris Metro.

4 comments:

This is the same continent which is deep into helpfully renaming Windows XP on behalf of Microsoft and stripping out a piece of software that's the only way I can guarantee my tech-illiterate relatives can listen to music I forward them.

They have score of inspectors making sure people work a 35-hour week, and that stores don't run unauthorized sales, etc. But France has one of the highest crime rates in Europe yet they are no more cops to be had.

Links, Selected Posts

Amardeep Singh, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh UniversityOn Twitter

My book, Diaspora Vérité: The Films of Mira Nair, is forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi in 2018.

I have been working on several digital projects in Scalar. All three are currently in progress as of summer 2017.
One is digital archive I am calling "The Kiplings and India." Working with a team of graduate research assistants, we have been building the site in Scalar here. Feedback welcome; it's a work in progress.

I have also been working on a Digital Collection called "Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1912-1922)" This project began as a collaborative class project called "Harlem Echoes," a digital edition of Claude McKay's "Harlem Shadows." The new version of the project is much-expanded, including McKay's early Jamaican poetry as well as his uncollected political poetry from magazines like The Liberator and Workers Dreadnought.